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Wednesday, 14 May 2014

Marching By Numbers

When doing the drill
corporal thing movement was always strictly by numbers. When in academic mode later and
questions of historical demographics arose, the statisticians were always
trying to get a fix on the actual numbers rather than other matters that tended
to clutter minds.

Now as we totter past all
the cars with BG, LT, LV and PL markers around our streets and the municipal
car park that overnight last weekend became a Romanian Travellers Camp, the
issue of numbers again comes to mind.

The latest fuss is that in
January this year, instead of having large numbers from Romania and Bulgaria
there were fewer than predicted by some.
Those who did not come made entirely rational and sensible
decisions. The weather was filthy, the
roads were a mess and on the farms little or nothing was being done.

Others point out that despite
this dip in the figures we still have a lot of people from those places and
more are coming. That some predictions
were excessive is par for the course in this kind of debate. Actual analysis is not, this is forbidden
territory because of modern sensitivities.

However, the crisis in the
Ukraine has at least reminded us that a nation state does not mean a coherent
and single group. In the Baltic states
there are minorities and some of those are Russians. It is likely that a number of our recently
arrived "Lithuanians" are in fact from their Russian minority, once
rulers, now very much ruled.

Movement can occur for
many reasons. There is ordinary economic
or personal movement, there is induced movement, either push or pull or both
and there is forced movement which can take various forms. In the present migration into the UK we see
elements of all these.

At the moment the excitements
are about that from the Balkans and Eastern Europe. But the ones to watch if only because of the
numbers are those from a number of places in Africa and from locations further
East.

Nigeria is in the
headlines at present and the figures there are instructive. The figures given in one source suggest that
it's population at present is around 170 million. A hundred years ago, when the British fully
established their ruthless and oppressive colonial rule (stopping internal wars
etc.) in 1914, it was 17 million.

By the time independence
was gained it had increased to 48 million.
So when there is debate about GDP, poverty etc. in order to have a
population that is more prosperous it would entail huge real growth,
distributed widely and with little outward capital flows arising from criminality
and corruption.

Looking around Africa it
is clear that this has not really happened in parts where there have been other
major population increases. A corollary
is that there will be population outflows wherever it is possible and they will
go where they can.

Even if these outflows are
only a small percentage of the population of the countries of origin if they go
to places with much smaller populations they will have a greater impact. If some of these places have multiple inflows
from many sources the aggregate effect is going to be large.

The consequences possible
include a progressive transfer of poverty levels to locations with inward
movement as the rate of population increase exceeds the rate of economic
growth, notably in economies more dependent on service sector activity.

If along with ordinary movement there is also
a transfer of criminal or other divergent elements unwanted and stressing
politically in their home locations this again will have consequences.

Who knows what could
happen? At present there are a limited
number of major grain growing areas in the world. One is the Ukraine, one is the Mid West of
the USA at risk of major drought and there are others that are vulnerable.

It is quite possible that
suddenly severe grain shortages could induce high levels of movement that are
entirely unexpected.